I have spent most of my career developing data warehouses\marts as Star Schemas because they were typically used in conjunction with Microsoft's Analysis Services. However, we are starting to leverage MicroStrategy 9.0.1, and I have been told that Star Schemas are less than optimal for this platform. MicroStrategy does not have an official stance on this topic so I thought I would ask this community. Should I still continue to use the denormalized structures, or should I consider a more normalized approach in reagards to this platform?
My intent is not to start a Kimball vs. Inmon vs etc war, any real world experience would be appreciated
Its actually not a big deal using star schemas with MicroStrategy. It just takes a little getting used to, and it generates fine queries with that format.
From a very seasoned MSTR consultant, I've heard the data shape MSTR really likes is a sort of modified snowflake. Where the data dimensions are modeled as a snow flake, but each tier contains the data of the tables in the hierarchy above it.
I think you can see the pattern in the jumpstart project. Located here: http://www.microstrategy.com/BI-application-jumpstart/
Ultimately, I think you should continue with the techniques that work best for you. The setup of the logical data model shouldn't be too much trouble, and MSTR has a ton of performance optimization techniques (caching, in-memory cubes, ...) that you can apply afterwords to juice things up.